China’ s Huddled Masses

In this week’s issue of The New Yorker, I have a piece called “The Promised Land” which looks at the wave of African traders moving to China. The largest group has settled in the city of Guangzhou, where Chinese neighbors have named the community Qiao-ke-li Cheng—Chocolate City. I did a podcast interview about the piece, and check out this slide show of photographer David Hogsholt’s terrific work. The piece is available in the digital edition.

An especially interesting interview on the subject never made its way into the piece, so I’ve highlighted some excerpts below. Prof. Adams Bodomo is a Ghanaian linguist at the University of Hong Kong and one of the first scholars to write in English about the African community in Hong Kong and Guangzhou. (In Chinese, a superb study on Africans in Guangzhou, by geographer Li Zhigang of Sun Yat-sen University and colleagues, is available online, as is an example of how the Chinese press covers the issue.) When I spoke with Bodomo in November, he was interested in how these early ethnographic-style studies will look in retrospect, if China develops a sustainable immigrant culture.

I said, “Let’s look at ourselves in fifty years’ time.” If this so-called new “ethic community” gets formed, these questions are going to be asked: Who are these people who came? Where did they come from? People thought well, usually these are people who have not highly succeeded in Ghana or Nigeria, who then go out [to find other work.] But among them you have quite a number of highly educated people, especially among the leaders I interviewed.

Bodomo is as interested in what the rise of this migrant wave indicates about its source countries as in what it means for China.

When I started looking at the Chungking Mansions [in Hong Kong] and later on in Guangzhou, the questions I was asking myself were: In what ways are these people in China different or similar to the African diasporas for example in Europe and America. In what ways were they similar? In what ways does this community inform us about new diasporas? For example, I lived in Europe for many years before coming here, and the majority of African communities were refugees, people who fled, and they all depended on the state for their livelihood, for social security and welfare and these kinds of things. That is the trend even now, even now in London and elsewhere. But I found that these guys were different: they are traders, so they are self-employed, they don’t depend on the state. And they even employ people, they even employ young Chinese as their interpreters. That is one striking difference.

Looking at this subject inevitably led Bodomo to see analogies in American history, to earlier generations of migrants who headed west instead of east.

Most of these migrants came into America, they had their businesses, they didn’t depend on government…Seen from an African background, many of these had their own shops in Africa and they look for new sources of products, so they came and they went, and then eventually they settled.

As Bodomo and other scholars see it, immigration, like other byproducts of prosperity, is an unfamiliar issue in China. For most of its history, China was so poor that hardly anyone but missionaries or marauders wanted to stay. China’s posture toward foreigners was erratic; it oscillated between the xenophobia that produced the Great Wall to the zealous overture of the Beijing Olympics. But China is still ambivalent about people settling down permanently, and Bodomo sees that as a the big question about whether these communities survive.

You would have thought there would be some clear path to residency. In America for example, they say, if you say here for seven years, you can you can become a resident or whatever. This kind of thing. But there is none of this kind of thing. And sometimes my Chinese friends say, “Well you can become a citizen.” But it’s not clear. When people are not clearly able to spell out a policy, it’s as good as not being there.

Evan Osnos joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2008, and covers politics and foreign affairs.